Introduction to flask

The flask module provides a microframework for creating web applications with Python. It makes heavy use of decorators to make handling HTTP requests very simple. It also keeps a lot of the internals away from your code, making what you write very easy to read, even with little knowledge of flask itself.

Since this book teaches by example, let's get right into setting up a flask server.

Our first web page

The first step is to install flask. As usual, we can install flask using pip inside a virtual environment.

Using the command line, navigate to the folder where you have been writing your chat application and enter the following commands:

python3 -m venv env

source env/bin/activate

pip install flask

Pip should take care of installing flask, along with its dependencies, inside your new virtual environment.

Once this has finished, create a folder named server alongside your Python files for the previous chapter. This is where we will be placing our web service for the chat...